adminPamela Shumba Chronicle Reporter
POLITICAL parties should respect humanity, maintain sanity and respect people’s differences during the pre-election phase and beyond, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisation (Nango), Mr Cephas Zinhumwe has said. In an interview on Friday on the sidelines of a peace-building training workshop for the Bulawayo provincial party leaderships, Mr Zinhumwe said the forthcoming elections would be peaceful if all political parties respect humanity and people’s differences.
The training workshop was organised by the Church and Civil Society Forum (CCSF) and the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (Jomic).
The training workshop was attended by provincial party leaders from Zanu-PF, MDC-T, MDC and Zapu.
Mr Zinhumwe said it was important for political parties to do all their work in a peaceful manner and remember that they are all Zimbabweans.
“Our elections are generally violent and as Nango we have extended our invitations to Jomic to expand the number of facilitators in terms of peace building in the country. We do not care about when the elections will be done but we want to encourage the political parties to be peaceful and respect people’s differences during elections,” said Mr Zinhumwe.
“We are happy that the political parties have committed themselves to the code of conduct and we are pushing it in the behaviour of parties, with help from the police.”
Mr Zinhumwe said some people were not happy with their parties’ primary elections, a development that could incite violence during the harmonised elections.
“Already some people are not happy with the way their primary elections were conducted and they have decided to stand as independent candidates. This ignites intra-party violence.
“The problem is that politicians are taking politics as their livelihood and find it difficult to put people first. We see what is happening in other countries and we do not need that in Zimbabwe because we are peace-loving people,” said Mr Zinhumwe.
He said the training programme, which is conducted in all the provinces also incorporates traditional leaders.
“We are also working with traditional leaders, churches and the police in our quest to assist them with skills to deal with conflict and prevent violence in their communities.
“In our programmes, we strive to make sure that we deal with the past. Some people are still disgruntled and hurt by things that happened in the past and such issues should be dealt with in an amicable manner,” said Mr Zinhumwe.
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